The next few days passed painfully and slowly as I adjusted to my new body and vise versa.
For starters, I crawled up and down the basement stairs to practice my leg extensions and joint tension. After a few hours of doing this while standing up every time I reach the top or bottom of the stairs, I was obviously far from tired but had worked up the courage to finally get tired.
Lucinda had already brought the treadmill out to put Poniard through his first exercise for me but the goblin was currently sitting beside the stairs resting with the artifact and his tablet. Now I was crawling to the treadmill, easily pulling myself up into a standing position and finding a center of balance. Once I turned the treadmill on with the first speed, though, there was a brief moment in which I almost fell forward from having my feet dragged.
It would have been better to keep Lucinda around, but my appetite had increased by a few sizes and she was working to help me with that problem at the moment. However, after several minutes of stopping and starting repeatedly I finally found a sense of coordination strong enough to raise and lift my first foot with proper timing. Then it was only another minute or two before I could take steps while relying on the pulse bar.
The only real issues I had were at the end of the day when Lucinda insisted on helping me in and out of the tub even though I could manage myself- at least until I was wearing a towel, any way. It was shameful and embarrassing at first because she actually tried to ease the tension of helping me take my clothes off with a joke about all the things that might be bigger about me.
The joke was absolute gold and would have had theaters deafened with laughter if this were a movie scene, but this was my life and I was being undressed by an undeniably attractive and arguably still young lady. I was not worried about what might have grown from the surgery, I was worried about growing then and there! Luckily, I kept my head full of puppies and grandmas to keep myself under control and wore a towel before anything ever even came off.
After those first few days, though, I was walking confidently around the house with little trouble. I could, more specifically, bathe myself. Most of all, I could start putting a little more pressure on my body.
Suddenly doing horizontal squats would have been downright stupid so I simply started with going through my combat stances and attacks with wooden weapons. The training weapons were provided by the Bureau when my equipment was returned the day before, so the grips were the right sizes. However, actually gripping the equipment was a different story.
I could pinch forks and knifes and anything else I needed between my fingers under normal circumstances, but actually curling my hand around something that was not bigger than my hand felt like trying to make a fist after waking up in the morning.
No matter how tightly I squeezed it did not feel like I had a proper grip but on the first few tools I ended up distorting or splitting their handles from grip strength. The next issues were the finer points of strength control and balance. Just because I could step into a swing did not mean I could resist the strength of my own attack and I ended up on the floor several times.
In quick succession.
Not only was I now right between six-five and six-six in height but I had also gained a lot of weight. After having my skeleton expanded and then condensed basically into ivory before my muscle density was increased to match, I had gained more than a hundred pounds. At more than three hundred pounds, all of my previous strength to weight ratios were distant memories.
Even though I was not well enough to actually check those ratios, yet, I could roughly estimate per limb the differences. My biceps could previously curl my body weight five or six times before straining too hard. Now, they could still curl my body weight.
By comparison, my legs were the strongest part of my body with isolated horizontal squats exceeding three-twenty. My overall strength in one leg was probably squatting and calf raising roughly seven hundred pounds. Disregarding the fact that this was more than twice my body weight, that was just a big number in general!
Sadly, even if my arms and chest and legs were not AS big as a JoJo character I was not quite a bit more muscular than before even though I had so much extra skin now. It did not help that I was now basically two meters tall like a JoJo characters, as well.
An entire week passed before I was finally able to start running on the treadmill and actually practice with my real weapons. Even though fifteen miles per hour felt fairly slow to me it was still hard to maintain my coordination at higher speeds. As well, managing the weight of a real weapon was vastly different from a wooden one even though they both felt just as light to me.
However, without any fancy equipment to rely on all I really had going for me was perseverance and access to healers. Halfway through the second week, I was more or less working out again at twenty miles per hour while wearing one hundred pounds on a vest on top of my usual arm and leg weights. That was just my warm-up, though.
My current rating was pretty much exactly one-ninety MP and my body was still changing from more than just the surgery. My 'natural' regeneration had gone to at least twice what it was before and I now healed at about the same speed as the goblin. This allowed me to finally work out twice a day safely with the use of my artifact but my body still was not ready for that.
Eventually, though, I was able to run at the treadmill's top speed of thirty for more than an hour with my weights on and I could perform entire sets of armed and unarmed techniques without tripping up after only a little more than two weeks of total rehabilitation. Now, it was finally time to get back on the registry. If Lucinda permitted it.
First, though, I needed to make my first trip to a gun range since getting grounded. For this I went to another location that was more expensive but did not restrict the use of lanes by the amount of ammo someone could use. Instead, you paid by the hour and could also buy from their own stock of E grade munitions.
After making sure that this place accepted contribution points for bullets, I paid for four hours on a single one-hundred-yard lane that was twenty yards across and littered with life-size paper targets of things like goblins and lesser beasts as well as their larger evolutions. There were poster cutouts of wolves, here, which was one of the reasons I did not often splurge on target practice.
I spent the contribution from my bounty assignment on ammunition for all of my guns to refill my general loadout before going to my lane as far from other people as possible. Setting out my guns, loads, and bullets on the barrier of my lane, I just stood there for a while looking at a dark brown wolf of a darkly familiar size baring its paper fangs. After a few moments of just emptying my mind and breathing, I abruptly picked up my revolvers and emptied them as fast as I could.
Despite three bullets recoiling with every pull of the trigger, the guns themselves were heavier than they used to be and I probably had more than twice the strength. In my hands, the revolver barely seemed to twitch into my hand as the barrel rose less than an inch in my tightly flexed grip. If the gun was not a solid E grade steel, now, I would have worried about damaging it.
Once the gun was empty I simply let the bullets fall from opening the chamber and reloaded as swiftly as possible. Then unloaded just as quickly as before. All of the bullets were hitting together and all of them were either in the head or tightly around it as large holes in the thick poster board.
In this fashion, I just muscle-memory aimed and fired through the first loadouts of either revolver. Not unlike the revolvers, once I loaded my combination rifle with drums I just started emptying it at the wolf. Even though the target was huge and the range was only half of a football field, this was the first time I was shooting a gun since my operation and ninety-percent of my shots were on point just from how little the guns fought me now.
Even shooting the last three bullets of all three drums at once was not enough to catch me by surprise. By the time I had to stop and reload all of my toys, the head and neck and shoulders of the wolf target were simply gone. There were pieces big and minuscule alike of poster board still fluttering in the air when I started reloading.
When everything was reloaded again, I checked the back row for any decent targets and decided on a tall troll in the back corner. For this round of firing practice I focused on aiming my shots slowly and just as slowly increasing the rate of aiming and firing. From this distance, though, I could only tell that I had been hitting the target after the first pieces started coming off when I emptied the first revolver's loads.
From my rifle every other triangle of three barrels seemed to tear at least one chunk away from the troll target. When the thirty-five slugs ran out and only the fifteen .300 rounds remained from my still casual sniping, I just kept pulling the back trigger to continue firing the rifle. Then I just kept combo-sniping until it was time to reload again.
From the results of my shooting so far, nothing had really changed or I had gotten even better because of the reduced recoil from my enhanced body. So, I just spent the next couple of hours alternating between speed shooting and carefully aiming at different targets around the field. When I was done, I swept up all the empty shells and casings in my area and dumped them into a trashcan across the underground walkway from my range.
Back home, I simply ate some food and went to sleep.
The next morning after I woke up and took care of myself, I messaged Director Carlyle to find me a good E grade goblin portal to enter before I did anything else that day. Then I got into contact with Ms. Gwyn and vaguely explained away my absence with medical reasons and asked what she and the rest of the party were up. Apparently, her personal party had already closed a portal that week but some of the others were out doing their own things.
I might be stuck playing party leader for the first time. It was not that I was not qualified for the higher paid position of team leader but I did not want the responsibility. I would rather just die proving myself right to a stubborn team leader instead.
While putting Poniard through his morning run with eighty pounds of weight, now, I got an email reply from the director including several file attachments. These attachments turned out to be case files for some recently opened portals within two hundred miles of my residence that contained goblins. The case files were, apparently, live in some way because even as I scrolled through the files list there was a line that suddenly turned from green to red in font color.
Starting at the top of the list where all of the closest portals started, I found myself looking through mostly some upper E locations with more than just goblins to deal with. Further down the list there turned out to be a few good lower E dungeons that were only goblins between one hundred and one-fifty miles but, after thinking for a while, I decided to go to a mixed dungeon.
Not so that I could catch more than just goblins but so that I could acquire some materials to make the goblins more valuable. If capturing and training a forest goblin the same way I did Poniard, with Poniard's help, was worth around fifty thousand dollars then a goblin that came with some simple cave rat hide armor and E grade ivory tools would be worth much more. The goblins would naturally come with the skins they wore for clothing to be recycled in a printer for cheap.
Because the director was such a helpful benefactor and I already had the legal limit of unlicensed combat pets or 'familiars', all I had to do was take a written test and send in a report of my goblin's combat effectiveness filled out by the same Bureau agent who pretended to scan me. They were not even there when I left the portal, but the report was accurate.
After having managed to sell the loot from the people I killed for cheap as weapons and then armor material, the cheap and naked two-acre property the director found for me by the city limits was already mostly paid for and a large portable steel warehouse building had been installed with a foundation that was twice its size.
One corner and one fourth of the property were taken up by this building, but the building still needed to be outfitted with the necessary housing compartments. Until then, Lucinda had agreed to let me catch as many as three goblins at once in order to finish paying off the property, modeling the warehouse, and start on modeling the property. Of course, I was still registered as F rank because I had never been formally updated so I would still get paid overtime with the director's help.
That was plenty to finish paying off the property in one assignment.
*